hurrying off on business of its own. And yet the
whole place gives me the constant sense of being an
island, remote and unapproachable; the great black
plain, where every step that one takes warns one of
its quivering elasticity of soil, runs sharply up to
the base of the long, low, green hills, whose rough,
dimpled pastures and old elms contrast sharply and
pleasantly with the geometrical monotony of the immense
flat. The village that I see a mile away, on a
further promontory of the old Isle, has the look of
a straggling seaport town, dipping down to wharves
and quays; and the eye almost expects a fringe of
masts and shipping at the base of the steep streets.
Then, too, the encircling plain is like water in its
tracklessness. There are no short cuts nor footpaths
in the fen. You may strike out for the village
that on clear days looks so close at hand, and follow
a flood-bank for miles without drawing a pace nearer
to the goal. Or you may find yourself upon the
edge of one of the great lodes or levels, and see the
pale-blue stripe of water lie unbridged, like a pointed
javelin of steel, to the extreme verge of the horizon.
The few roads run straight and strict upon their reed-fringed
causeways; and there is an infinite sense of tranquil
relief to the eye in the vast green levels, with their
faint parallel lines of dyke or drift, just touched
into prominence here and there by the clump of poplars
surrounding a lonely grange, or the high-shouldered
roof of a great pumping-mill. And then, to give
largeness to what might else be tame, there is the
vast space of sky everywhere, the enormous perspective
of rolling cloud-bank and fleecy cumulus: the
sky seems higher, deeper, more gigantic, in these
great levels than anywhere in the world. The morning
comes up more sedately; the orange-skirted twilight
is more lingeringly withdrawn. The sun burns
lower, down to the very verge of the world, dropping
behind no black-stemmed wood or high-standing ridge;
and how softly the colour fades westward out of the
sky, among the rose-flushed cloud-isles and green
spaces of air! And out of all this spacious tracklessness
comes a sense of endless remoteness. While the
roads converge like the rays of a wheel upon the inland
town, each a stream of hurrying life, here the world
flows to you more rarely and deliberately. Indeed,
there seems no influx of life at all, nothing but
a quiet interchange of voyagers. Promotion arrives
from no point of the compass; nothing but a little
tide of homely life ebbs and flows in these elm-girt
villages above the fen. Of course, the anxious
and expectant heart carries its own restlessness everywhere;
but to read of the rush and stress of life in these
grassy solitudes seems like the telling of an idle
tale. And then the silence of the place!
The sounds of life have a value and a distinctness
here that I have never known elsewhere. I have
lived much of my life in towns; and there, even if
one is not conscious of distinct sound, there is a